Group Vibe: The Microbes Infecting Your Classroom Culture

Have you noticed that strong personalities shape group personalities? Dominant children exert significant influence on the group vibe, spawning behaviors that either enhance or compromise the health of a learning space.

When a classroom culture is hurting, we naturally want to find the source, and often our minds will take us to influential children in the social network. Identifying classroom leaders helps us feel as if we have someone to blame for our classroom management struggles. But before we pin our headaches on certain children, we should consider the forces that allow behaviors to spread like contagions.

Every human lives with tender areas, some that exist at the spiritual level and others at the level of our physical makeup. When these vulnerable places become aggravated, we tend to respond in ways that hurt our learning communities.

Microbes infiltrating classroom culture

Spiritually speaking, people are created to love—to love God more than anything and to love others as ourselves. But sin makes us hoard this love, looking after our own interests before we think about what others need. How does this inward focus affect leaders and followers?

Sometimes influential children enjoy manipulating social settings: they take pleasure in creating drama or in making others conform to their wishes. In turn, followers intuitively understand that impressing those peers is the way to advance their own status, to earn cool points with the class. As Shin and Ryan note, research on peer norms indicates that students whose behavior aligns with classroom norms enjoy higher status in the group. Therefore, self-centeredness is one spiritual microbe that bogs down classroom culture.

Moreover, we are physical creatures with physical limitations. Science has long told us that our nervous systems are wired to keep us safe: when we feel physically threatened, we tend to prioritize security ahead of making friends or reaching our full potential. 

Recent research in the field of interpersonal neurobiology (the study of how our brains talk with each other below the level of consciousness) has revealed that we also need to feel secure in social situations. As Kirk Olson notes in his book Invisible Classroom, the sense that others are judging us or actively disregarding us triggers visceral responses akin to the reactions that propel us amid physical threat. How do these constraints affect classroom culture?

We can’t always uncover the challenges that drive natural leaders to influence social settings, but here are a few causes I have encountered. Occasionally trauma or an unstable homelife induces a need to control others. Sometimes learning differences make children feel inferior, so they compensate by making waves in the social environment. On the other hand, prominent students may be exceptional learners who are not familiar with struggling or being wrong: they dread failure so they hold back or express disinterest. Whatever the case, the behaviors that prominent children exhibit tend to rub off on their counterparts. 

How does neurobiology impact followers? Children who take their cues from natural leaders are acutely aware of power dynamics, especially when hostility arises between teachers and pivotal students. This tension creates a security challenge for students in the middle: Do I align with the dominant peer and risk displeasing my teacher, or is it safer to do what my teacher wants and jeopardize my standing with the class chief? Accordingly, a second microbe of classroom culture (the neurobiological component) attacks the security and connection that everyone needs.

Managing microbes

What can be done to manage the microbes that propagate behaviors? Teachers often presume that if they find a way of controlling a classroom leader, they will hold the key to regulating the class. I suggest a different approach. Most dominant children enjoy their influence. Therefore, it may be infeasible to wrestle away a person’s leverage or even sweet-talk them into sharing some of the attention they attract.

Instead, consider how to support the followers in your learning space, those who conform to influential peers or work hard to meet their approval. Can you alleviate any needs that they may be trying to meet? Self-determination theory posits that people thrive when they experience autonomy (a sense that their opinions matter), competence (a belief that they can succeed), and relatedness (the feeling of belonging). Sadly, dominant children in a peer network can undermine those needs in peers. Their looks and demeanors seem to say: Your opinion counts only if it aligns with my opinion. If you wish to belong, you must take your cues from me.

To ease the grip of prominent students on your class, consider how to offer those “self-determination gifts” that controlling children withhold. Here is one way: Research suggests that providing emotional support decreases the tendency of students to adopt the disruptive behaviors of their friends. In other words, it appears that teachers can impact social dynamics (the influence of children on each other’s behavior) through the ways in which they personally interact with students (i.e., by providing unconditional love). 

My book, Solutions That Heal: Responding to Infectious Behavior in Learning Spaces, provides additional remedies. It explores the effects of self-serving (spiritual) or self-preserving (neurobiological) microbes on classroom culture and offers a healing approach. 

The next post in this series delves into the ways that behavior contagions weaken teachers and impair our ability to lead.